So how much design is enough? In my experience, enough design ends up being as much as you can fit in to the time allotted. I’ve never been on a project where I was given unlimited time before I had to start showing some progress towards the end product...

In your time as a developer, you’re going to see a lot of different ways people approach design. I worked with a guy once who had to start every project by first creating the database that would power it. I worked with another who needed to know what...

In my previous post , I covered design heuristics. I wanted to return to the topic to touch upon a topic that I feel is often overlooked. In fact, in the entire section on heuristics, only a single paragraph was dedicated to it. The concept of designing...

The section on Heuristics should be immediately familiar to any student who has gone through an Object Oriented programming course. Even so, it bears re-reading, as it is often quite easy to forget why what we are taught is such a good thing. Had I kept...

As an aspiring developer in school, you may easily be mislead into thinking that the problems you will face will be well defined, straight forward, and that you’ll be starting everything you do from File –> New Project. You’ll also likely be led to...

Lindsay Rutter recently joined the Academic Evangelism team and will likely spend some time blogging on Springboard this year.  I’m especially excited that Lindsay has joined since we’ve previously worked together on outreach in New York City. ...

Depending on the project, you could be well served by spending a good amount of time designing your system. You don’t always have the time it takes to finish designing everything to the degree you might want, so there’s a good chance that you’ll have...

The checklist presented at the end of Chapter 4 is a great place to ensure that you’re ready to start construction. If you aren’t sure what something in the list means, then you’re reading the right book. It took me a couple of projects to know when I...

On one project I worked on, I ran into a problem that I immediately knew how to resolve, and it was going to be really easy to do. Unfortunately, the solution that I had for it was using regular expressions as they were implemented in Perl, and Visual...

Right now, programmers have it pretty good. Tools have evolved to the point where even pre-beta CTP languages have great environments to work in, and the community aspect of coding has been emphasized such that any developer has resources that they can...

Programming conventions are important, even when if you’re the only developer on a project. When you’re right in the middle of writing some code, you totally understand what you’re doing. You can list off the variables you’re using, how you’re going to...

The choice of the programming language you use for a project has the potential to help or hinder your progress greatly. For a new project, you have the luxury of examining the project’s requirements and choosing a language that fits. However, many development...

Code Complete , takes me back to the days when I was in the trenches, slinging code. My first job in the industry was working as a software developer for a very small software company, where I started off as a junior software developer maintaining legacy...